A Tulip by any Other Name

I've been playing a game recently that is quite fun. One of the things that you have to do in it is collect flowers for a receptionist at a mental institute. It...it's a long story. Anyway, in several different areas of the game's world there are flowers scattered throughout. I saw a rose and picked it up, knowing that it was the answer. When I offered the flower to the receptionist, she rejected it, instead glancing to a picture of three pink tulips on her desk. It was a blatant clue and I was embarrassed not to have noticed it before. While I marched my little men across the screen I thought of what other implications this could mean. Men sometimes compare women to flowers, the most common being a rose. Why is that the automatic association? What makes a rose so romantic?

Here's something I came up with:

Men think of flowers like they think of women. They want one that screams femininity. They want one that is always perfect, one that is what you would picture, one that you would imagine. But a rose is always the same, they look the same even though they may have different colors or shapes. A woman who wants to be a rose is a thin, styled, immaculate being, but they have thorns. They want to be perfect because they believe they are. If you aren't perfect, you don't deserve them. THIS is a rose girl:

Do you want that? Maybe if you're shallow. Look at her. The peace sign, the giant sunglasses (indoors), the twisted lips. The hair that looks both frosted and frozen. This is what a rose is; trite, boring, and somehow still associated with romance.

Back in the game, I gave the receptionist three tulips and she set them up in a basket next to her desk. Do you know what a tulip looks like? This is one I found:

A tulip is the kind of girl I'd like. Tulips can be a lot of different colors. But sometimes they can end of like this:

look at that! Why would you think a rose is better than that? A Tulip Girl isn't afraid of hard work, and doesn't make herself up to be more than she is. A Tulip Girl could walk by you on the street and you wouldn't notice. There are thousands of Tulip Girls and they are pushed back because rose girls must have your attention. People might not even realize that Tulip Girls exist, but when they do they stop and go "that's a girl worth something." Tulip Girls are the ones in movies that have glasses and wear their hair up until the end, when they glasses fall off and the hair comes down. They become something else, they are in control of themselves.

Somebody once told me that giving a single rose to a girl means you will love her forever. Forget that, I'm going to give girls tulips from now on. Roses are boring, roses are cliche. Roses will forever be the standby option for men who forget or for men who are uncreative. I am neither of those, and a Tulip is the kind of girl I want.